


Upon Your Head

by Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cecil Headcanons, Cecil Is a Good Boyfriend, Cecil is Human, Cecil isn't actually insane, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Slice of Life, such pointless fluff, there are methods to his madness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 14:56:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Prismatic%20Bell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos needs a haircut. Amazingly enough, it's not haircuts Cecil is opposed to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Upon Your Head

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this in about three hours. It's not betaed, but the letters are all in the right places.
> 
>  
> 
> What Cecil discusses doing with his hair to keep cool in the desert is an actual thing. I lived in the Sonoran Desert (i.e., one of two deserts Night Vale might be in) for two years, and I would put it up in a bun while wet and then stick an ice cube in the bun. No replacement for drinking water, but it'd keep you cool for a good 2-3 hours. This particular Cecil has a braid long enough to wrap around similarly to a Dutch braid crown, so he could easily wet his hair and be good for an entire day.  
>  
> 
> I'd like to be  
> The first white hair upon your head  
> To be your cherry pie  
> Your daily bread  
> I'll cook for free  
> I'll make your bed  
> If I can know the things you've thought and never said
> 
> \--"Hey You," Shakira

“Here, sit.”

Carlos does as he’s told. He tries not to think too hard about what’s behind him, or about the general lunacy of letting Cecil--

“It’s going to be easier if you lean back, Carlos,” Cecil chides gently, and Carlos tips back Cecil’s office chair, feels Cecil run a hand through his hair.

“I don’t actually have anything for curly hair,” he admits. “That’s not going to screw you up, is it?”

Carlos almost shakes his head before remembering his hair is almost certainly dangling in a bowl of warm water. “No. It doesn’t dread up after a single wash. And I usually just use regular conditioner anyway.”

“Good,” Cecil answers, and then he pushes on Carlos’ shoulder. “I wasn’t kidding, you’re going to give yourself a kink in the neck if you keep bending like that. Lean back.”

Carlos does, still trying not to be nervous about the scissors Cecil’s got laid out on a towel. It’s all well and good for Cecil to say he knows how to cut hair, but Cecil’s hair is straight and thick where Carlos’ is wiry and curly and Carlos is pretty sure trimming split ends, sometimes deciding to do something radical like chopping off a whole inch and a half, doesn’t entirely count as “knowing how to cut hair.” 

Still--it was easier than arguing with Cecil about whether or not he was going back to Telly’s. And if it looks terrible, well . . . Cecil will be happy, and in six weeks Carlos can get it fixed.

It might be worth it to convince Cecil in the meantime that he likes washing Carlos’ hair, though. Carlos is pretty sure he can actually feel his near-constant headache breaking up into pieces and washing away into the bowlful of soapy water, and when Cecil stops long enough to get conditioner Carlos is sure of it.

But eventually Cecil pulls the bowl away and slides a towel neatly under Carlos’ hair, wraps it up and drops a kiss on his cheek before rubbing, hard, all over. A curl falls out of the towel and flops all the way down to Carlos’ nose, and he laughs in spite of himself. Cecil grins.

And grabs the scissors.

Carlos fights the urge to fidget when Cecil starts clipping. His hair is going to be shorter. His hair _needs_ to be shorter, before it catches on fire or snags on something in the lab. And Cecil knows how to cut hair . . . or at least, so he said.

“Tell me how you ended up learning to cut hair,” Carlos says at last, interrupting Cecil’s quiet humming. “Is this anything like bowling alley owners having to be doctors?”

Cecil’s laugh is a little strained, and he stops cutting long enough to touch Carlos’ cheek. Carlos reaches up and puts a hand on Cecil’s wrist. It’s not funny, not really, but--as Carlos explained to Cecil after Cecil went on a tearful tirade about Things That Just Aren’t Funny Don’t Joke About That Carlos--if he can’t indulge in some gallows humor at his own expense, he’ll go insane. Cecil goes back to his work, and when he speaks his voice sounds natural again--good.

“It’s not,” he answers, and then there’s a pause and he dangles a curl in front of Carlos’ face. “I like this one. I think I’m going to keep it.”

This time Carlos can’t help it--he twists his head to look up at Cecil, carefully wrapping the clipped curl in a piece of paper towel. “For what?”

“Just because,” Cecil answers. “Maybe I can get a necklace to keep it in. Then I’d always have a piece of you with me no matter where you are.”

“I’m not sure if that’s incredibly sweet, or incredibly creepy,” Carlos comments. “So how did you end up cutting hair?”

“So,” Cecil begins, and goes back to sending little black commas of hair down onto one of his bedsheets. “When I was seventeen I decided I was going to do something different to my hair because it’d literally been cut, like, never, like I think my mom might have gotten me a first haircut just to say I’d had one and I never had one again--”

“And you lived in a desert,” Carlos cuts in. “That sounds smart.”

“It is, actually,” Cecil answers. “That’s why you braid it up wet and then stick some ice cubes in there. You’ll stay cooler than someone with short hair and you’ll do it longer, too. I should know, it took about three years to grow back out where I could tolerate it.” He stops, brushes his hands through Carlos’ hair, strides to the front and stares critically before shaking his head and starting in on a section Carlos is pretty sure he’s snipped three times already. “Anyway, so, I was seventeen, right, and I had hair--I never really paid attention to how long it was down because I never really _left_ it down, when you’ve got it wrapped around your head you only need to wash it once a week or so and I really try to avoid mirrors, but when it was braided it was down past my rear end and after awhile plain black just gets _boring_ , so I went to Telly’s.”

Carlos hears the tone in Cecil’s voice, the one that says someone’s about to get a rant written on their flaws, possibly called a jerk or--if Cecil’s feeling particularly vulgar--an asshole, and wonders if this was really a safe topic while Cecil has scissors in his hand. Cecil separates some curls and goes back to work, and Carlos relaxes the tiniest bit--his voice is angry but his hands seem calm, and that’s good. Carlos doesn’t particularly enjoy the idea of going bald.

“I told him I wanted to get gold streaks,” Cecil says, and Carlos wrinkles his nose as Cecil parts his curls forward. They tickle his forehead. “Or maybe a frost, you know, nothing I couldn’t dye back to black if I really hated it, and he said okay.” Cecil combs the hair back and clips something else. “I walked in there with seventeen years’ worth of black hair. The third time I walked out five days later I was crying and the three inches I had left were bright orange.” Carlos hears a soft sound, and then a low buzzing--a trimmer. “He doesn’t know how to do anything with ethnic hair. I ended up wearing bandannas for most of the year after some of the more burnt clumps fell out--”

“What did he _do_?” Carlos is aghast--aghast, and a little less shocked by Cecil’s reaction to his first haircut in Night Vale. He can’t imagine losing a lifetime’s worth of hair in a single go.

“Left the dye in too long,” Cecil answers. “So then he said we could dye it back like I’d said I wanted to have as a backup in the first place and I’m not really sure what he did with that except when he washed it out I looked like a tiger. Or I would have, if it’d been a nice shade of orange. That wouldn’t have been so bad. But it was _terrible_ , Carlos, it was like looking at a migraine. Or at least that’s what Big Rico told me, I’m not really sure what a migraine feels like.”

A year and a half ago, Carlos might have been stopped dead by a statement like that. Now he doesn’t even blink. “It feels like what you’d see right at the point where neon orange and lime green meet, if someone was shining a searchlight through them from behind.”

Carlos doesn’t need to see Cecil’s face to know there’s an absolutely terrible expression on it. “No wonder you don’t go out. I wish I’d known.”

“They don’t happen that often,” Carlos reassures him. “I get why you wouldn’t want that on your head, though.”

Cecil pulls the trimmer away so he can shudder. “Ugh. Anyway, that’s when I learned to cut my own. I wasn’t ever going to let him touch mine again. Here,” he adds, and produces the hand mirror Carlos brought with him. “Still too long? Because I thought, I can always take off _more_ , but I can’t exactly go back and uncut it to take off _less_ \--”

Carlos is staring into the mirror, stunned. His ears don’t look like they’re sticking out at weird angles and there’s still enough to hide how wide his forehead is without getting in his face. He runs a hand through the back.

“No, actually, I--” He turns his head as far as he can while still getting a look in the mirror so he can see the sides. “I really like it.”

He tilts his head up in time to see Cecil’s delighted grin, and smiles back. “Good. So no more Telly’s?”

Carlos shakes his head. Then he reaches out and tugs gently on Cecil’s braid. “I told you later this year I have a conference to go to when I head back to the university for a couple of days,” he says, and Cecil lets out a sad little sigh.

“You’re going to be gone for _a week and a half_ ,” Cecil agrees, and Carlos has to bite his tongue hard not to laugh. Cecil makes ten days sound like ten years.

“You should come with me,” Carlos tells him. “You said you’ve never been to New York. And there are people there who do absolutely nothing but working with ethnic hair. You could come back with gold streaks.”

Cecil’s mouth falls open. “Really?”

“Really,” Carlos agrees, and touches Cecil’s lips. “Come with me. It’ll be almost a year, we can do it for our anniversary.”

Cecil makes a soft sound, and for a second Carlos thinks they’re going to end up on the sofa while his hair is still only mostly dry. Then Cecil starts cleaning up his trimmer with prim little motions Carlos figured out close to a year ago are Cecil’s way of hiding bounce-off-the-walls excitement. “I can talk to station management tomorrow.”

“Do that,” Carlos says, and reaches up to touch Cecil’s cheek. “As long as you promise me one thing.”

“Anything,” Cecil agrees, and Carlos feels the same little thrill he gets every time Cecil says something like that, even though he knows ‘anything’ is a lie born of flexible limits neither of them has yet reached. This--thankfully--is not one of them.

“Before we go to New York,” Carlos says, and runs a hand up into the loose strands near the front of Cecil’s head. “You need to cut my hair.”

**Author's Note:**

> Liked it? You wanna know the insane mind from which it sprung? Hit me up at prismatic-bell.tumblr.com.


End file.
